Original subtitles

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

My dear Theo.

I envy the Japanese.

The extreme clarity that everything in their work has.

It's never done.

It never appears to be done too hastily.

Their work is as simple as breathing.

And they do a figure with a few confidence strokes.

With the same ease as if it was a symbol as buttoning your waste code.

I was managed to do a figure with a few strokes.

That will keep you busy all winter.

Once I have that, I will be able to do people strolling along the boulevard's.

The streets, a host of new subjects.

Ever yours, Vincent.

From Gok, never traveled to Japan.

Yet he had a profound admiration for the art from this country.

And he thought a lot about Japan, about Japanese art, about Japanese artists,

but it was, of course, all based on the print, the colored woodblock print that he collected

and that he owned.

And he, in a way, he constructed his own image of Japan.

And that also shaped his way of looking, of making art inspired by Japanese prints.

This exhibition for many people is a revelation because, of course,

not everybody knows that he was so much influenced by this art,

but also he was able to somehow change his style in a very fundamental way.

It's so natural to make an exhibition about the thing about Japan,

because he himself says that it's his biggest inspiration source in the year of 88.

And that's, of course, the greatest period of his artistic life.

Bongo started to copy Japanese prints and he imitated the Japanese motifs in the beginning.

And so, no way he went to assimilate Japanese styles and Japanese devices.

And he tried to borrow some Japanese compositional devices,

very flat colors and high horizons and like that.

Also, very helpful, of course, that we have most of the Japanese prints that he bought in Paris.

And he bought at least 660 of them, and we've got the majority of them in our collection.

Not only at Van Gogh's time, which was the 1880s, but already from the 1860s,

artists has been fascinated by Japanese art.

Artists like Wistler, Mane, Roda, Duga.

They all had looked at Japanese art as a kind of completely new way of looking at the world.

They were fascinated by the unusual compositions, the great clarity of lines and forms,

the great attention to details from nature, for example.

The unusual viewpoints insisting on the flatness of shapes,

using large color planes surrounded by contours.

This represented a completely new way of looking, and artists were using those innovations in their own work.

Many of them were also collecting prints like Van Gogh did.

They had collections, and they were using those prints to get new ideas about looking at nature,

looking at the world, and making new, very daring compositions.

Van Gogh was also reading about Japan and Japanese art.

For example, the book by Louis Gonzalez, Larja Pone, this was a very important publication on Japanese art.

It was the first French book on Japanese art, which described extensively.

Different art forms from Japan, also decorative arts, painting, drawing,

and there was a whole chapter on Hawkside, for example, was already at the time the most famous Japanese artist.

Another important book for Van Gogh was Madame Christantem by Pierre Lotti, a French novelist who had been travelling in Japan

and describes the customs and the landscape in Japan and for Hawkside.

He was very enthusiastic about his book.

He would have been one of the few artists who would have not been surprised by Japanese art.

As the Netherlands had had a long relationship with Japan, he would have known about Japanese culture to certain extent.

He would have seen objects, his uncle was in the Navy, he actually went to Japan.

So even in the family, he would have seen that.

Because there were also shops already, and during the interest in Japanese art, grew also in artistic circles,

other artists who made my art with whom he wanted to be associated with, they were interested in Japanese art.

And they had used the bird's eye view, the strong outlines, the flat colors, the more unrealistic one could say, representation of nature.

In their own work, as Van Gogh always did when he discovered something new, he got widely enthusiastic and ran with it.

Very fascinated by this vocabulary as well as the subject matter of Japanese art.

That allowed him to associate in a new way.

I think Van Gogh was the most influenced by Japanese art, not only in the style and not only in the subject and devices, but also in his own ideals.

And that's quite extraordinary phenomena.

And Van Gogh ideal at Japan idealized Japanese people and Japanese painters.

That Japanese dream played a very crucial role from Van Gogh's artistic career.

That's quite different from other artists.

From around 1600 to 1868, Japan was ruled by a feudal military government, the Tokugawa Shogunate.

This era is also known as the Edo period and it was a time of relative stability maintained firstly by suppressing social unrest and secondly by keeping the country closed to foreigners.

Japan did not want to be influenced by the West, especially not by Catholicism.

A wealthy Japanese merchant class emerged, enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle, known as Ukyo, translated into English as the floating world.

They patronized the arts and indulged in the services of high-class quotasans called Oiran and female entertainers known as Gacia.

Some limited trading did occur with countries like China, Korea and the Netherlands through the trading post of Tajima in Nagasaki, but others like America, Russia and most of Western Europe remained firmly excluded from this lucrative market.

But by the middle of the 19th century, change was in the air.

1853, when Bangkok was born, exactly the same year, Komodo appears from America.

He came to Japan and forced Japan to open the doors to foreign countries.

That's a very simple year for Japanese history and also for Bangkok himself.

In Japan, in the early 19th century, it was 13th century.

In the early 19th century, there was no such thing as the United States, but in the early 19th century, it was the first time in the world.

But the fact that we are doing our own things,

we need to make a sense of the meaning in the sense that we are going to be doing everything.

I would like to ask all of you this question.

I want to say that the Japanese people are trying to understand

how to use it, the Japanese people are trying to understand it,

the former leader who died in the UK,

if he was transferred to Japan,

he would be right next to his father.

But, as a result,

he could never go back to Japan

when it comes to the world.

It is mainly the political side of the outer world.

so he took all of the he cast him as.

The Edo period ended in the summer of 1868,

shortly after the accession of Emperor Meiji,

he had seized power from the Shogun

and started a process of modernization.

This became known as the Meiji period,

which lasted until 1912.

The young Emperor Meiji,

outward-looking and enlightened,

urged Japanese people to learn from the West,

and to adopt Western practices.

First of all, Japanese art arrived in the Netherlands,

ever since the early 17th century,

when the Dutch were the only country

which had access to Japan.

And immediately establishing a foothold there,

art started to move towards Amsterdam.

And later, when Japan was open to the world,

and after 1853, Japanese art started to come

to Paris, to Europe, on a much wider scale.

With the ascension of Emperor Meiji,

he hired Western experts to introduce the photography

for the currency, Dutch engineers, Irish architects

to advise on the fortification of the harbors,

German legal experts, et cetera.

So he was continuously looking towards the outside

for information, how to set up a modern state

in the shortest possible time.

They had the double agenda.

They were keen on collecting information

from the Western world.

They wanted to know about family life.

They wanted to know about military organization, social organization

about issues like marriage, and also infrastructure.

But they always had a complicated attitude towards the foreigner

and his potential influence.

They have to show their own history to foreign people,

for example, in the occasion of the world exhibitions.

The first Japanese art history that was written

for the world exhibition in Paris

in order to show the whole story of the Japanese art.

So in that way, they wanted to present themselves to foreign people

and they were involved in the world of politics.

This opening of the borders allowed not only for trade,

but in particular also for objects, art objects

to come out of the country and into the Western world.

In Europe, in particularly in France,

there were collectors who were incredibly interested in Asian art objects.

Later also prints, paintings, there was a way of decorating your home

and it was a way of establishing really serious collections.

There was never a journal that was never a newspaper,

which didn't have at least an ad about something Japanese in it.

It was part of the cultural landscape

that you could not avoid.

Japanese art, of course, influenced many artists in the second half of the 19th century.

For Jorge's belief that he was part of a decadent society,

and he was longing for a simpler society,

he believed that Japan stood for that kind of society

and that this was also linked to the kind of art that they made.

It was simpler.

This art is connected to what you could call cultural primitivism,

that stands for a more simple kind of society

and a better kind of society and also, therefore, a better kind of art.

According to him, you could find it in Japanese prints,

but you could also find it, for instance, in the beginning of realism.

And in that case, you were talking about beginnings of Dutch 70s and 3 art.

So looking for Rembrandt and France Hals,

which he thought symbolized the same kind of thing.

Vincent Van Gogh was born in 1853

in the rural Dutch village of Zendant,

where his father was the local Protestant pastor.

He was the eldest of six children,

and from the age of 16, worked in his uncle's art business,

Guopal and Company, in the Hague, London, and ultimately Paris.

Every day, he was exposed to a diverse range of artwork.

But by his early 20s, Van Gogh had become increasingly disillusioned with this life

and sought solace in reading intellectual literature and writing religious texts.

He took up lay preaching in England and the Boranage region in Belgium.

His austere ways and stoic evangelism led to his dismissal,

and that provoked a deep despair.

My dear Phil, when you say in your last letter,

what a riddle there is in nature, I echo your words.

Life in the abstract is already a riddle.

Reality turns it into a riddle within a riddle.

And who are we to solve it?

All the same, we yourselves form a particle of it

of the society of which we ask, where is it going?

To the devil or to God?

Vincent Van Gogh always had a close relationship with his younger brother, Theo,

to whom he wrote constantly.

In these detailed and revealing letters, they shared opinions on life, art and literature.

Theo was constantly concerned about his brother's poor finances and failing health.

He encouraged him to find a new purpose in life.

At the age of 27, Vincent decided to pursue a career as an artist.

He moved first to study in Brussels and then developed his practice back in the Netherlands.

We have to remember that he only worked as an artist for 10 years.

He had been working in the Netherlands for five years,

drawing for several years before even starting to paint.

And when he painted, he painted mainly in dark colors,

and he was very much influenced by, for example, the Barbison school,

the French realistic landscape painters, peasant painters such as Jean-François-Vamilla,

and then, because he realized that he needed to find a new way

for his art that he wouldn't be able to sell his works

and to have the necessary contact with other artists.

And he moved to end work, to be in a big city again,

and to be able to look at other art being contact with other artists.

My dear Theo, these docks are one huge Japanese ery, fantastic,

singular, strange, at least one can see them like that.

I would like to walk with you there to find out whether we look at things the same way,

one could do anything there, townscapes, figures of the most diverse character,

the ships as the central subject with water and sky in delicate gray,

but above all, Japanese ery's.

I mean, the figures there are always in motion.

Once sees them in the most peculiar settings, everything, fantastic,

and interesting contrasts keep appearing out of their own accord.

My studio is quite tolerable, mainly because I've pinned a set of Japanese prints on the walls

that I find very diverting. You know, there's little female figures in gardens,

or on the shore, horsemen, flowers, now, foreign branches.

The word Ukyo is consists of two parts, Ukyo, which translates as the floating world,

or the fleeting moment, an air is an extension, which means image of

and Japanese prints was one of the most common commodities that were brought in.

Japanese dealers and Western German French dealers were part of that process.

They were like pin-ups. You wanted an image of a geisha that you admired.

You could perhaps afford to actually visit her, but you could also do the second best thing

in this by an image of her. And artists and publishers exploited that idea.

We often describe Ukyo as being the product of the Ukyo-A quartet,

which means the involvement of the publisher, the artist, the block pattern, and the printer.

So, someone like Hawkeside producing his famous, great wave was not the only one involved.

In a production process, he was important. He made the primary design,

but he had influence, of course, on details of the printing and of the color use and special effects.

But he was not the one to create the final product. The block covers and the printers were crucial,

and you can see a large degree of quality difference between those craftsmen.

An early impression is highly coveted. The same original print might be worth 200 euros

for a very late impression, but might be 20,000 or 50,000 euros for a really early printing.

The print of the great wave that is in the exhibition is an example of how you would want

a print like that to be. It is beautiful, full size, it has no center fold, yellow boats have retained

their color, is vaguely orange cloud, which goes over the top of the print, and all that has been

conserved perfectly. And that's quite remarkable. It's the majority of prints, even the copies

of that same design in museum collection are often quite poor. And to find a good one is extremely

difficult nowadays, and this is in a way surprising because it's not a rare print,

the edition must have amounted to 6 to 8,000 copies.

Japanese Japanese Japanese Japanese French refers to the interest in Japanese art, and this was

like an collector of liberty. Japanese refers to also this phrase for all things Japanese,

but more fundamentally to the influence that Japanese art had on Western culture and the visual

arts. The whole interest in Japanese main Japan was in a way almost like a fashion that grew

pretty suddenly because these objects came on the market were promoted, were collected,

were hardly sold after. Japanese were could be found in many many different levels. There was of

course the collecting classes, the rich people who could afford to buy and adorn their houses,

but you could also go to the department store and find Japanese fans.

Someone like the Gungku brothers claimed to be almost taste makers at the time who wrote

the novels which then go love to read already in the Netherlands, but they were also great

collectors of Japanese art, but there were many others like Zikfried Bing, for example,

was an art dealer who specialized in Asian objects in particular such Japanese, but not only

major exhibitions were done from the collection of Zikfried Bing because he had such incredible

material. But he also wrote about Japanese art with his journal Luzha Pong, Tistik, which became

really important. Talked about Japan, described the landscapes, suddenly people could put an image

to it that was not only a picture or a reproduction in a journal. Another art dealer was Hirashi,

who also dealt with Japanese objects and there were enough wealthy collectors of Japanese art

in Paris at the time. Hirashi Kada Masa imported hundreds of thousands of items over a 10-year

period. And Hirashi was often in the role of the perveyor of knowledge about Japanese art. So

he was seen as the source of knowledge on the artist, on Hoksai, on Utama, or on all the famous

Ukyo artists. Hirashi would supply the background information as it was available in Japan.

Hirashi wrote about the spring of Japan and he compared that to Italy and very bright color

and bright sunlight. And when cherry blossoms are blossoming then the whole mountain looks like pink cloud

or something like that. And I think that was enough for European people to dream about the

radius of the artist. In 1886, Van Gogh decided that he needed to be at the center of the artistic

world. Paris. He arrived in Amat and moved in with his brother Theo, who was now building a reputation

as an influential dealer, working with young artists. Van Gogh immersed himself in current artistic

developments, looking at impressionism and experimenting with Neo Impressionist techniques, such as

pointylysm, which was considered avant-garde. But another rich source of inspiration for these artists

and a constant talking point was Japanesema. Always looking for ways to generate income and

recognizing the popularity of Japanese art. Van Gogh decided on a plan, to buy a large quantity of

Japanese prints from the dealer's secret ring in order to sell them at a profit. He didn't have the

kind of money to buy oxye's for instance and the ones that he did buy were not that expensive in

the sense that they would cost you a drink at the bar. Was he interested in certainly he liked their

exutism and he liked their colorfulness but the main aim was indeed selling. We noted from his

letters that he buys 660 prints and he pays 100 and Frank's for them or actually he doesn't pay

100 Frank's because he pays only 10 and then later on he says to his brother, you should go back to

see if they're being paid a rest of it because we should keep this collection. He has then realized

that it's important material for artists not just for himself but also for other artists to work with.

And after this decision to buy this whole lot of Japanese prints he then exhibits them in the cafe

that he frequents, which is the cafe of his then-lover Agostina Saga Tori. He puts them on the

walls there and he hopes to sell them but that doesn't work out so then he keeps them and he also

gives some away to artists, to friends and he's saying they are also learning from it so it's

a very valuable thing after all. My dear Theo, it was a rich bear who said somewhere,

the love of art makes his loose real love. I find that terribly true but on the other hand

real love puts you right off art. Most of all I would like to be less of a burden to you and that

is not impossible from now on. As far as misogatories concerned, that's another matter all together.

I still feel affection for her and I hope she still feels on for me. When I saw her again she didn't

hurt my feelings, which she would have done if she was as nasty as people say she is.

As he moved into the artistic circles, as he participated in the discussions and he met many,

many artists, contemporary artists at the time, he then realized that there had to be something

else, that in order to be a part of that you couldn't just use breaststroke and color and paint outside,

but there was so much more going on that if you had to distinguish yourself somehow, you needed

to create a special way of connecting to something that was actually modern and one of the things

that was perfect for that was actually Japanese art. From the summer of 1887, you can really see

something new happening and that had to do also with the new friends. He was hanging out with

often like Emil Bernar or Superal Gugang, also where he starts to think about new ways of creating

imagery and it starts with a spectacular painting and that is the courtism. He takes different

images, different details from various Japanese friends and puts them together. So he sees

magazine cover with the woman on it. He takes it, squares it, like the most traditional way of

making a copy and then puts it on canvas enlarging it. And then around it he uses various

imagery of landscapes very typically cliché like Japanese motifs. What he does and what makes it,

I think, such a strong and imposing picture is not only size, which is very ambitious for him,

at that time, but also the fact that he uses these intense colors, which were not in the originals.

He really brightens up, in particular, the courtism is just an explosion of color almost.

And he uses a very strong and distinct brushstroke in there. Very graphic, a lot of

impasto, you have a sense of paint, which is all very different from the flatness of the Japanese

print. And it is sort of a true force almost of trying out what you can do when you use direct sources

in your work. As if you're making a statement about, okay, here I am and now I'm going to try to be a

Japanese. For him it's like trying out a completely new way of looking a new style with forms and

colors and lines that's so different from everything that he seen before. So making copies after,

for example, the old masters was a very common way of learning for artists, also at the art academies.

So when he's looking at Japanese prints and he's trying to unravel their way of working,

doing copies helps him get acquainted with his new style. And you could look at them as

imitations, but of course, they're much more than that because he's also adding his own colors,

his own brushstroke, he's adding elements from other prints, so he's making a kind of

new thing from these copies. It's really about making it his own.

I saw Peyton Gi yesterday and he put a canvas I had just done in his window. I've done four

since you left. And I have a big one on the go. I'm well aware that these big long

canvases are hard to sell, but in time people will see that there's open air and good cheer on them.

Now the whole lot will make a decoration for a dining room or a house in the country.

He was really important for him because he was this paint dealer who had

interesting contemporary art, you could go there get paint and canvas for exchange for painting

sometimes he exposed the presented in his little shop window work by Newhart. So it was sort of

meeting place, you could find works by Cisanne, you could find works by Cisanne,

in the windows. You went there, you met other artists, it was sort of a place where you could hang out

as well. And then go sort of set up a very nice relationship not only on a commercial side,

but in particular also on a personal level. I think they liked each other. Typically when go,

he then associates a person with certain ideas such as an interest in the worker, so you have him

in his dark blue suit, but also the element of Japanese Megan Buddhism. So he looks like a Buddha

almost in his pose. Of course it's also very modern.

While in Paris Vincent refined his technique and absorbed the many artistic influences the city

had to offer, he actively involved himself with other artists and experimented with materials,

colour, perspective and composition. His passion and intensity sometimes overwhelmed him.

After a series of failed ventures, rejections and disappointments, he became

embedded with life in the city. Van Gogh sort of changed an acquired or existence.

So he decided to leave Paris in search of new subjects and new inspiration.

In February 1888, he pinned some Japanese prints to the wall of Theo's apartment as a gift

and headed to Provence in the south of France.

My dear Theo, during the journey, I thought at least as much about you as about the new country I was seeing.

But I tell myself that you will perhaps come here often yourself later on.

It seems to me almost impossible to be able to work in Paris. Unless you have a refuge in which

to recover and regain your peace of mind and self-composure, without that you be bound to get utterly

numbed. Now, I tell you that for a start, there's been a snowfall of at least 60 centimetres all over

and it's still snowing. All doesn't seem any bigger than bre da or more to me.

Before reaching the Rascorn, I noticed some magnificent scenery.

Huge yellow rocks are laid jumbled together with the most imposing shapes.

In the small valleys between these rocks, there were rows of little round trees with all of green

gray green foliage, which could well be lemon trees. But here and all the land seems flat.

I noticed some magnificent plots of red earth planted with fines, with mountains in the background

of the most delicate lilac and the landscape under the snow with a white peaks against a sky as

right as the snow was just like the winter landscapes that Japanese did. The south of France is

very different from Japan, but when you look at all the images that he had in mind and you look

at the landscape around Arle, which is also quite flat landscapes with hills in the background

and mountains in the background. And of course, the intensity of the colors, which is very different

than in the north, with more warmer colors. And this is something that he liked in the prince.

So he's very happy to find himself in this country and in nature, which reminds him so much of

nature in the Japanese prince. What he did do is to search for colorful motives in the south

and then he was imitating it. So you see in the beginning, only that he took the motive of the

merchants, but they do not have much in common with this search for a flat kind of effect,

because the motives themselves are difficult to combine with flat motives, trees, blossoming.

So it's not there yet. He had to conquer that, you could say.

I tend to think that it's very typical. Therefore, in deed, like the Japanese prince, with the most

outspoken kind of coloring, because he associated them, indeed, with, well, the everyday kind

of prince, not the current sugar kind of prince, I tend to think, run off the male kind of prince

with every day kind of motives. Those were the things he was after in his own art.

Dear brother, you know, I feel I'm in Japan. I say no more than that and again,

I have seen nothing yet in its usual splendour. That's why, even while being worried,

that at the moment expenses are steep and the paintings of no value,

that is why I don't despair of success in this enterprise of going on a long journey in the south.

Here, I'm seeing you things, I'm learning, and being treated with a bit of gentleness.

In our, when God does not only find his mature style in painting, one could say,

when he really develops and personal vocabulary, both in the type of imagery, as well as

the material he uses, that does not only happen in painting, but also in his drawing.

He'd always been very interested in drawing, had always done that, from the beginning of his

career, actually. But in our, he suddenly realizes that he achieves a new level of

draftsmanship, I could say. When we look, for example, as the view of the core, this grand landscape,

which he also translated into painting, but in his drawings, we see this very quick, swift way of

using the pen, creating a bird's eye view, and also the fact that he would make something where

all the elements would look very small, so that you had this mega view into landscape with lots

of lots of tiny details, was also something which he actually related to Japanese art. So we have

two elements, Japanese, one is the big view point, the way of using a technique that could be

related to Japan, as well as this interest, this respect in nature, in the smallest details,

this simplest, most modest element of the world, which when you had the right respect for that,

you could actually then go on and capture all of nature. And also that was something that he took

from, text about Japan, and translated that into his framework of Japanese.

My dear Banan, having promised to write you, I want to begin by telling you that this part of

the world seems to me as beautiful as Japan, for the cleanest of the atmosphere and the gay color

effects. The stretches of water make patches of a beautiful emerald and a rich blue in the landscapes,

as we see it in the Japanese print, pale orange sunsets, making the fields look blue,

glorious yellow suns. However, so far I've hardly seen this part of the world in its usual

summer's splendour. The women's costumes pretty, and especially on the boulevard and

there you see some very naive and well-chosen arrangements of color, and that, too, will doubtless

get even lifeless in summer. If you're thinking in terms of motive, see this looking for

sunny motives as well. So the sun is there all the time, just as large as in many of the Japanese

prints, because he just wanted to emphasize that it was just as friendly and just as colourful as in

Japan and this in the south of France as well. In fact, he wanted to depict as many flowers

as possible in the south and he discovered, of course, that the flowers were not there,

because it's too sunny there. The temperature is simply too high. So what he did do,

then he went to the gardens of the people in the city and started to depict their flowers in

their comforted flowers. You could say in their gardens, because he simply wanted to stay in harmony

with the idea that you could find flowers there. So you see that there are all kinds of

clichés about the south in connection to the prints that he wants to follow.

As a very strange, everything he says, he described as Japanese.

What is the kind of crystallization I should say? He idealized the country,

and everything, what he sees in the south of France, he thinks they're all Japanese.

And his own ideas, he described all of them out the Japanese. Well, we can also use the word

opposition, but I would rather say crystallization because he attached all his ideas around the

nucleus around the corals of the Imaginary Japan.

My dear Theo, you already have a drawing of it. A farmhouse beside the wide road in the

meadow, full of very yellow buttercups, a ditch with iris plants, with green leaves, with purple

flowers, the town in the background, some gray willow trees, a strip of blue sky.

If they don't mow the meadow, I would like to do this study again, because the subject matter was

really beautiful, and I had trouble finding the composition. A little town surrounded by

countryside entirely covered in yellow and purple flowers, that would really be a Japanese dream,

you know. The question is, okay, we see certain elements in his

earth and we can connect some of them with Japanese art and some of them we cannot.

And every time we have to balance whether he believed that it was a Japanese element or not,

because that's important, we have to view it from his point of view.

So one of the things for instance, that's important to realize for a whole really started to make

indeed close-ups of nature after he had board all those prints, not before that. So there is

influence in the sense that he took that from the prints. The question is a little bit,

whether he considered that a Japanese kind of trick. That's questionable because actually

what he was doing was something which the impressionists were doing all the time already.

So I tend to think that he did not consider that so much as a Japanese kind of thing.

It only became Japanese in the sense when he puts big things on the foreground in order to make

the picture flat. He's making paintings in which you can really see the Japanese influence

reflected, but he's incorporated into his own style. He's applying much stronger colors,

that's also, of course, because of the light in the south, but also because these prints have

helped him to look at reality in another way. He's still always, basis his work on reality,

he puts his easel in front of his subject and he's painting that the landscape or the portrait,

but the way the Japanese prints are made in very large planes of colors with very strong lines.

In a way it's about simplifying your compositions and making them stronger and it's about choosing

very strong even garish colors that are not necessarily realistic and that adds to the strength

of the painting and this is something that he very much learns from these examples. Of course,

there's many influences on his work, but this was one that really fitted with what he wanted,

what he was striving for.

Dear Theo, now that I've seen the sea here, I really feel the importance there is in staying in the south.

I'm sending you by the same post some drawings of summery. I did the drawing of the boat as I was

leaving very early in the morning and I'm working on the painting, a number 30 canvas with more

sea and sky on the right. Look, we love Japanese painting, we've experienced its influence,

all the impressionists have that uncommon. So I believe that the future of the new art still lies

in the south after all, but it's bad policy to live there alone when two or three could help

each other to live on little. I would like you to spend some time here, you'd feel it.

After some time, your vision changes, you see with the more Japanese eye, you feel color differently.

I'm also convinced that it's precisely through a long stay here that I will bring out my personality.

The Japanese draws quickly, very quickly, like a flash of lightning, because his nerves are

finer, his feeling simpler. I've been here only a few months, but tell me, in Paris,

would I have drawn in an hour the drawing of the boat?

Portraitia became very important subject matter for when go in hour, very different from earlier,

and now it was the modern portrait that she was doing. Modern portrait, of course, had to be

at least in large part, Japanese, because that was the modern T. So what does one do, A, one has

maybe an exotic subject matter, which was perfect in this war, a soldier from a regiment,

which had very colorful outfits, was very dashing, and very intense using

flat areas of color that recall in a way the Japanese prince that he had been studying

from his memory now, because he had very few Japanese objects with him. They were sent to him later

by his brother, but Suáver was from a regiment where they had really dashing and color for

costumes as well, so what he saw was translated in this way.

Dear Theo, I have a model at last, as Suáver, he's a lad with a small face, the neck of a bull,

the eye of a tiger, and I started doing one portrait and started again on another.

The bust length, I painted of him, was terribly hard. In a uniform, the blue of blue,

enamel saucepins, dull orange red trimmings in two lemon-yellow stars in his chest,

a common blue, and very hard to do. I've stuck his very tend,

feline head, wearing a bright red cap in front of a door painted green, and the orange bricks

of a wall. So it's a coarse combination of disparate tones that isn't easy to handle.

The study I did of it seems very hard to me, and yet I would always like to work on portraits

that are vulgar, even garrish like that one. It teaches me, and that's what I ask of my work above all.

The bright colors, contrast, the outlines, all that, become a major element in his

making an image of a person in front of him, but more interesting are those portraits,

where he brings the story of Japan into the painting he makes of someone from Kovons,

and the grand example of this is, of course, La Musme.

My dear Theo, now, if you know what a Musme is, you'll know when you've read Lottis Madame

kiss on them. I've just painted one. It took me my whole week. I wasn't able to do anything else

having been not too well again. That's what annoys me. If I've been well, I'd have knocked

off some more landscapes in between times, but in order to finish off my Musme, I had to save my

mental powers. A Musme is a Japanese girl, Bravon Salle, in this case, aged between 12 and 14.

That makes two figures. There's love and her that I have.

When he describes it, he really describes sort of the Japanese story that he wants to evoke in

that work. And another example of this bringing together a Japanese or Japanese story with

portraits is, of course, the famous self-portrait is Bond.

My dear Goga, I have a portrait of myself, all Ash Collard, the Ash Collard that comes from

mixing Virenys with Orange Lad, on a pale background of uniform Virenys with a red brown garment.

But exaggerating my personality also, I look more, for the character of a Bond, a simple

worshipper of the eternal Buddha. It's a work that he exchanges with Goga, his friends,

Emile Bernard and Paul Goga who are at that time in Britain together. And these are the two

friends with whom he most elaborately has been communicating by letter about Japanese art,

about Japanese, about what they were doing, how modern they were in all their work.

And so for him to present himself as a bonds, that's how he himself calls it, meaning

Japanese monk, who was totally dedicated to his art, going away from worldly pleasure,

but only focusing on your mission, all these, of course, thoughts that are part of the message

that is being sent here, also something that is being discussed with the friends. And he varies

strongly once to make the point that his identity is completely fused with Japanese concepts.

My dear Bernard, for a long time I've been touched by the fact that Japanese artists

very often made exchanges among themselves. It clearly proves that they liked one another and

stuck together, and that there was a certain harmony among them, and that they did indeed

live a kind of brotherly life. In a natural way, not in the midst of intrigues,

the more we resemble them in that respect, the better it will be for us.

While in all, Vincent started dream about an artist colony, hoping other artists would join him

so they could work and discuss art together. After some persuasion by Theo, Paul Gogan made

the journey to art to stay with Van Gogh in his yellow house. In preparation for his arrival,

an excited Van Gogh made several paintings to decorate the walls, such as the Sunflowers

and the Bedroom. For two months, they drank and ate together, and painted the same

model side by side. Unfortunately, it didn't end well. Vincent Van Gogh's regime was too intense

for Gogan, and they had a huge argument, ending with Van Gogh cutting off his left ear

in a drunken rage. Gogan left all, and after a period in hospital, Vincent Van Gogh decided to

check himself into an asylum in Saint-Ramey to recover. What you do see is that for

whole indeed goes to the South France with the idea that his art should be kind of

terribly, it should be consoling. He's depressive, and apart from that, he already claims that

he is an alcoholic, and he doesn't know what the future will mean for him. But he's hoping that

creating art in harmony with the Japanese prince, he can create a kind of cheerfulness for himself,

so that he will be reconciled with the fact that his life in fact is very sad.

So when he goes into the asylum and is having again a text in a different way than before,

but after again, he realizes that he has to slow down and not put as much as fantasy in his art work

as he did the year before. He really believed that aiming for Japanese art had made him psychologically

ill during his stay in a row. Van Gogh had his breakdown at the end of December 1888.

I think with his breakdown Van Gogh was shaken to the core in his self-esteem and his self-confidence,

but immediately after the first breakdown at the end of December, Japan reappears.

And also in Saudi Arabia, Japan continues to be a very important force as an inspiration for

the work he does when we think of the close-up views of nature that he does,

which relate directly to his reading of Bing's Lujapan artistic, where Bing writes

elaborately and very beautifully about the respect of the Japanese artists for a single blade

of grass, something that Van Gogh picks up, one of the prints from that journal is on his walls in

when he goes to Saudi Arabia in May of 1889. He takes these ideas with him and explores them

in the garden of the asylum in motifs very importantly of cut off trees where you see

only the tree trunk being focused on the ground looking at the small detail of nature.

He emerges from these periods of illness and creates these amazing works of art.

In spite of his illness, while at San Rame, Van Gogh created a lot of masterpieces

that are considered some of his finest. Despite recurrent lapses, Van Gogh drew and painted

flowers, tree trunks, grasses and insects, partly inspired by Japanese artists' attention

to the minute details in nature. He also returned to copying the works of the old masters

he admired, such as Millay, Delacua, and Rembrandt. After a year in the asylum, Van Gogh felt

strong enough to discharge himself and move back closer to the Earth, who by this time had married

Yobonga. Paris was considered too risky for Van Gogh's fragile state of mind, but the nearby

rural village of Overseo was, seems suitable. The area was popular with artists like Bizarro

and Sissan. Theo knew of a homeopathic doctor and artist there called Porgashe, who agreed to keep an

young Vincent. Van Gogh made his way to Overseo's, and found a small room at an inn

the Overseo revo, where he slept and painted. After the breakdown in Overseo, his Japanese dream

was over, but still he was interested in Japanese art, and the Overseo sure was he went to

see the Japanese print exceptions in Paris, according to Bozailing Paris. So he wanted to know

real Japan, that's different from the Japanese dreams, but he was still trying to keep contact with

Japan even his last months. Overseo was of course the place where Van Gogh passed away,

where he's buried, and after he passed away and after Gashie passed away, the heritage of

Van Gogh was kept by the Gashie Jr. The Japanese became fascinated by Van Gogh in the early 20th century,

when first the partial translation of the letters appeared in print in Japan, and soon afterwards

images of his work arrived often reproduced in journals, Black and White, that is how the first

images of Van Gogh's paintings were introduced to the Japanese audience. It's very very interesting

that few Japanese people saw Van Gogh's original paintings, but even without seeing them, they could

idealize Van Gogh. In Overseo was the son of Dr. Gashie was still living, and the Japanese people

knew that Dr. Gashie Jr. at the time is willing to show a Van Gogh's last works to Japanese guests.

So many, many people went to Overseo was to see his works and also his graves,

because what the Japanese thought to be the typical modern artist, that was Van Gogh. I can't explain

why but Van Gogh was very close to their artiscideals. That was true.

At the time, right after Van Gogh's death, his fame began to rise.

Majorically, it's extraordinary. Of course, very convenient at this time's terrible, but

it's suicide, the madness that gave grand background for the 19th century idea of genius.

Then in Milvana published the letters, and so there was the machine, so to speak, the marketing

machine got going. There's an enormous amount of interest, and the first 10 years of the 20th

century, the amount of publications, comments, exhibitions that are made about Van Gogh's work is huge.

So, anyone looking for new art, looking for contemporary developments, could not avoid Van Gogh.

It was a very difficult time, but I think it was a success.

But if Van Gogh was a composer, who was an artist who was a composer, who was a composer,

he was a composer who was a composer and a composer who was a composer, who was a composer.

I don't think Japanese people would be able to speak Japanese.

I don't think Japanese people would be able to speak Japanese.

That's why I thought it was the first time.

I think Japanese people would be able to speak Japanese.

I think Japanese people would be able to speak Japanese and speak Japanese.

So I just wanted to tell them that Japanese people would speak Chinese.

You know, Japanese people are able to speak Japanese.

But Japanese people are very embarrassed to speak Japanese.

The first time I thought about the music video, I was able to see the music video that I was able to watch.

I was able to see the music video that I was able to watch.

I wanted to study the future with my own friends.

I was able to work in a place where I was able to enjoy the holiday.

I was able to find the way I own.

I was able to enjoy the holiday with my own children.

I was able to enjoy the holiday with my own children.

But when I was a kid, I was a little bit nervous.

I think that's why I think that's why I was a 1st rock.

I was a little bit nervous.

So I was like, I don't know what I was going to say.

When I was 12 years old and 30 years old, I remember that I was putting color reproductions

of vengaspanings on the ball. I didn't know, I don't know why. But after that, I read

old letters of vengel. Then I thought, how was it possible that this kind of man who is very

difficult to live in society and can manage to be a red artist with the help of the brother

and the way it's a strong passion. And that's as moving. And that should have been moving to

the most Japanese artists in the early period.

In current society, an ideal of simplicity makes life more difficult. And he who has it, this ideal,

he merely ends up as, in my case, unable to do what he wants.

The Japanese have lived in very simple interiors and what great artists have lived in that country.

If a painter is rich in our society, then he lives in a house that resembles a curiosity shop

and that isn't very artistic either. To my taste.

And I myself have suffered greatly from living so much in conditions where order was impossible.

That I lost the notion of order and simplicity.

The voice of the people living in a life is for the sake of the Japanese.

But I don't know if I can't understand it.

The story of the Japanese is a personal one.

The story of the Japanese is a man who has a mirror that makes a reaction to the Japanese,

What do you think about the situation?

How did you get involved in that situation?

How did you get involved in that situation?

How did you get involved in the situation?

as the 50 years ago, but still Van Gogh is a kind of icon and also idealized person,

the most popular artist in Japan. Europe is still admiring Hoksafe. So it's a kind of

spiral. It's not the same way but still going around around and they're just creating what

they want to see in other cultures. I don't think that he would have necessarily known

Japanese artists in the same way as he never wanted to go to Japan. It was a concept and an

idea. He never wanted to go. He didn't need to because what he needed was just a construct with

which he could work to develop his own however and the meaning of it. He then brought to life

something which didn't exist but which I think then allows one to relate with one's own emotions

or with one's only imagination and I think that's a great part of the attraction Hok fingers work.

My dear brother, you know that I came to the south and threw myself into work for a thousand

reasons, to want to see another light, to believe that looking at nature under a bright

sky can give us a more accurate idea of the Japanese way of feeling and drawing.

Wanting finally to see this stronger sun, because one feels that without knowing it,

one couldn't understand the paintings of deliquat, from the point of view of execution,

technique, and because one feels that the colors of the prism are failed in mist in the north.

All of this remains.

Someone true.